Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 01 - Lost Angel (24 page)

He thought about his reluctance to try to interview Charlie Simms and to return to Rejoice. He’d never had that kind of problem as a cop. He’d always gone straight ahead. At the start, as a uniform, he’d felt the rightness of what he was doing, working to make the city he lived in safer. The department had been rawer then, full of big personalities and wild behavior, and, far down on the chain of command, he’d rarely run up against political restrictions. As he’d gotten older and come to understand the limitations of his job better, he’d still gotten satisfaction from solving puzzles and from working in an organization that, despite its many flaws, tried to uphold standards and protect citizens. As the department had gotten more paperwork driven, and he’d bumped into political constraints more frequently, he’d managed to ignore it all by just paying attention to what he did every day, to trying to solve crimes and put bad guys in jail.

Then, one day, he’d been the bad guy in jail. Inside the department and out, the wheels had ground him up. Minority groups had called for his head. The newspaper had joined in. Jeffords had decided to do the politically expedient thing. And the machinery inside the department had rolled relentlessly forward, producing the evidence to convict him.

Being on the wrong side of an investigation had hurt. In an organization like the police department, dominated by male values like stoicism and cynicism, he’d never let himself admit that he loved his job or made himself face the fact that it somehow filled needs that couldn’t be touched by anything or anyone else in his life. Once he was no longer a part of it, though, he’d seen that clearly.

In prison, without an anchor for his identity, he could feel his drive and certainty slipping away, replaced by the prisoner’s apathy and fear. He began to doubt himself, what he’d done, who he was. And even though he’d been exonerated, was free to go where he pleased and do what he pleased, he was still a prisoner of his fears and doubts.

He wasn’t a cop anymore, and never would be again. So what was he? A civilian, like the kid trooper said. A civilian whose time in prison and lack of other job skills severely limited his employment opportunities. About all he was suited to was private work. He wasn’t happy about that. The private detectives he’d known as a cop were either sleazy or incompetent, and he had a hard time seeing himself as one of them.

But he needed to do something. If he didn’t, all that was left was retirement, sitting in some condo someplace warm, collecting his pension, eating cat food, looking at his silly legs sticking out of a pair of shorts, and counting the minutes until happy hour. He wasn’t ready for that. He never wanted to be ready for that.

Maybe he was at Mass to seek help with his weakness, a miracle. God, he thought, I’m a drunk. Cure me. I’m a killer. Save me.

“The Gospel for today is from Matthew, chapter ten, verses twenty-four to twenty-six,” the priest said. “‘The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household? Fear them not, therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.’ ”

Is that a message to me? Kane thought. Was this, finally, God answering a prayer, if only in the scratchy voice of an old priest? Is God telling me to quit being afraid and just do my job? “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.” It might not be a miracle, but it was a coincidence.

His life was full of uncertainty now. So be it. He’d just have to accept that and go forward. The police force, prison, his marriage, they were all in the past. He was, amazingly, a new man at fifty-five, a new man in reluctant search of a new life.

17

PROVERBS 20:3

 
 
 
 
 
MASS ENDED, AND KANE WALKED OUT INTO THE CLEAR chill of winter. He took out his cell phone, saw he had a message, and called for it. Larry Littlefield’s voice told him that there was nothing about anyone named Feather Boyette in any of the criminal databases.

“But one of my computer monkeys found a Feather Collins in the archives of the Fairbanks paper,” Littlefield’s voice said, “giving money to some charity or cutting a ribbon or something. Maybe she’s your girl. How many women named Feather can there be? Either way, remember that I drink the single malt. Here’s the Collins woman’s address.”

Littlefield rattled off an address and the message ended. Well, Kane thought, as he wrote the address in his notebook, that’s a long shot.

He walked back to his truck, drove to the grocery store, and emerged with some bags of groceries and a case of beer. He stopped at Café del Mundo for a couple of pounds of ground coffee. He made another stop at Lowe’s and bought a set of heavy-duty bolt cutters. He sat in the parking lot, breathing deeply and telling himself: No more excuses and no more hesitations. It’s time to go to work. He started the truck and drove back toward Rejoice.

He stopped at Summit Lake to drink coffee from a thermos. The view was as spectacular as that in any national park in the Lower 48, and there had been a time when he could have sat there and looked at it for an hour. Instead, he found himself thinking about what the priest had said: “There is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.” He had to keep moving forward now. To lose his momentum was to lose control of his new life. He gulped his coffee, tossed the dregs out the window, and drove off.

Slade opened the door of the Devil’s Toe trooper office. Kane handed him the case of beer, then went back for the bags of groceries. When he returned, Slade led him to the back and up a flight of stairs to the living quarters. They walked into a living room, furnished with a couch and a couple of easy chairs. A pocket kitchen was separated from the living room by a breakfast bar, and a hallway led to what Kane assumed were the bedrooms. Two investigators were sitting in the living room amidst paperwork and the remains of a meal. Kane knew them both.

“Hello, Harry,” he said, “Sam.”

“Killer Kane,” the one he’d called Harry said. “Shouldn’t you still be in prison?”

“Nice to see you, too,” Kane said.

“Knock if off, Harry,” Sam said. “He doesn’t mean it, Nik. We’re both just unhappy to be told we have to let a civilian poke around in the case. Nothing personal. Any civilian would be the same. You’d have felt that way, too, back in the day.”

Kane turned on his heel and walked out, down the stairs and out the front door. He retrieved his duffel bag and sleeping bag from the truck, carried them back up the stairs, and dumped them on the floor.

“Don’t anybody get in a hurry to help,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to hurt anything.”

He pointed to the case of beer on the countertop.

“It’s an assortment of local beers,” he said. “They should be cold. Help yourselves.”

The investigators looked at one another.

“You going to tell us what you’re doing, messing around in our investigation?” Harry asked.

Kane got himself a glass of water and took a seat in one of the chairs at the counter, spinning around to face the room. His smile wasn’t friendly.

“I’m not just some civilian, Sam,” Kane said, ignoring the other trooper investigator. “And I’m not really here to investigate the mine robbery. The people over in Rejoice have asked me to find one of theirs who’s gone missing. Chief Jeffords asked me to help, too, and as I guess you found out before you left Anchorage, I have somebody high up in your chain of command I can call. Plus, I’m consulting with Charlie Simms on mine security. Is that enough for you yet?”

Harry started to reply, but Sam held up a hand.

“We just don’t want you tracking up our investigation,” he said.

“Fine by me,” Kane said. “I’ll need to borrow Jeremy here in the morning for a little while to help me with my investigation, and I certainly don’t want to get in your way. Just for curiosity’s sake, though, what is your next step?”

The two men looked at each other again. It was all Kane could do to not burst out laughing. He dug into the case and pulled out some beer bottles.

“Like that, is it?” he said, handing one to each of the troopers. “Well, let’s drink to the fact that most criminals are stupid, and whoever took the payroll will probably fuck up and catch themselves.”

The investigators looked at Kane, and suddenly all three of them were laughing.

“You might be a clown, but you got that right,” Harry said. “Cheers.”

They drank, Kane sipping his water, and told stupid criminal stories for a while.

“You remember that bank robber,” Sam said, “the one who wrote the holdup note on the back of one of his own deposit slips? Had his name and address right on it?”

“Yeah,” Kane said, “and how about that guy who killed his wife and tried to burn her up in the fireplace and when he was caught in the act claimed she’d died and fell into the fire on her own and he was just feeding her in because it wouldn’t be dignified to let her be seen in a coffin all burned like that?”

After they’d laughed and drunk some of the tension away, Kane unpacked his groceries and made himself a sandwich. The others kept drinking, Harry polishing off two bottles to everyone else’s one.

“I tried to talk to Charlie Simms when I was in Anchorage,” Kane said, around a mouthful of turkey, ham, and Havarti, “but he’d had emergency brain surgery and was in no shape to be talking. According to his wife, it’s touch-and-go if he ever talks again.”

“It figures,” Sam said. “There’s not enough evidence in this case to stick in your eye.”

“Got any results back from the lab tests on Charlie’s clothes yet?” Kane asked.

“Are you kidding?” Harry said. “With the budget the crime lab’s got, the techs are working nine to five, Monday to Friday, and that’s it. We won’t get any results for a couple of days at the earliest. Medical examiner’s office is the same way, so we won’t get anything from the body ’til then, either. Doesn’t make any difference to any of them that both victims used to be cops.”

That set off a round of bitching about the hard life of the law enforcement officer, followed by fresh beers for everyone but Kane.

“Nothing from searching their rooms?” he asked.

“You know the answer to that,” Harry said in a sour tone. “You been all through their stuff. All we found is that Simms lived like a monk and Logan lived like a slob. You didn’t happen to remove anything we might be interested in, did you?”

“Like what?” Kane said. “The minutes of their last robbery-planning meeting?”

Harry tried to struggle out of his chair. It occurred to Kane that everyone in the room except him had had too much to drink.

“You always were a superior son of a bitch,” Harry said, “but I guess you got what was coming to you.”

“Harry,” Sam said.

“Don’t Harry me,” Harry said. He looked at Kane. “You know what it was like to wear a uniform after you shot that kid? Do you? All the jokes about drunk cops and the sass from teenagers? ‘What you gonna do, off-i-cer, shoot me?’ We got new shooting protocols and mandatory alcohol counseling and stricter firearms-discharge reviews. And all because you couldn’t hold your liquor, you no-good son bitch. I should kick your ass for that.”

Harry was swaying a little now. Kane slid off his stool, walked around the breakfast bar, put his hand on Harry’s shoulder and eased him back down in his chair.

“Nobody’s fighting tonight, Harry,” he said. “It’s time for sleep.”

He turned to Slade.

“I suppose you’ve only got enough beds for the three of you,” he said.

“There’s the couch,” Slade said.

“Just give me the keys to the holding cell,” Kane said. “I’ll sleep down there. It won’t be the first night I’ve spent in a cell. Will it, Harry?”

The trooper investigator waved his hand sloppily but said nothing.

“Guy’s a drunk himself,” Kane said quietly. “Probably scared to death he’ll do something that’ll cost him his pension. Or worse.”

Slade handed him some keys. Kane picked up his duffel and sleeping bag and walked downstairs. He opened the cell door, spread his sleeping bag on the bunk, and went to brush his teeth in the bathroom off the office. He set his travel alarm for seven a.m. and lay down. He tried to think about Faith Wright and what he needed to know, what he knew, and what he suspected about the mine robbery. But he couldn’t. Instead, he thought about what Harry had said. It might not have been a crime to shoot that kid, but it had been a sin. And he’d done his penance, hadn’t he? His penance, and then some. He followed these thoughts into the darkness. When the alarm dragged him into wakefulness, it seemed like he’d been asleep only a matter of moments.

18

 
LUKE 8:17

 
 
 
 
MISS EVELYN WISP, THE PRINCIPAL OF DEVIL’S TOE REGIONAL High School, did not look happy. She gave Kane and Slade the sort of look Kane’s fifth-grade teacher used to give him after some particularly boneheaded escapade. In fact, Miss Wisp—she insisted on the “Miss”—looked a lot like that teacher, whose name Kane could not for the life of him bring to mind. All the boys had simply called her Sister Mary Pointer, because a long, heavy wooden pointer had been her preferred tool for correcting misbehavior.

Of course, Kane thought, that nun would be five hundred years old by now. And he doubted she would have broken her vow of celibacy, even if she’d been able to find a man desperate enough to help her do it. Could be a grandniece, though, Kane thought. It was all he could do not to ask her, but he and Slade were having enough trouble with Miss Wisp without adding fuel to the fire.